Russian and Soviet arms control and disarmament policies have been guided by several unique and enduring themes. Though often not stated explicitly, these themes have consistently had an impact on disarmament policy formulation, and its goals and expectations, throughout the history of the region.

In ancient Russia and later in the Soviet Union, geography guaranteed that any potential armament or troop reduction had to take into account the defense of a huge territory and vast borders with few natural defensive barriers. Russian history recalls a succession of invasions from east, west, south, and north, and both Russia and the Soviet Union frequently demanded implicit "compensation" for this geographical vulnerability.

The long-standing economic and technological backwardness of the country--a result of the feudal Russian economic and political system, comparatively late industrialization, and the mediocre economic achievements of socialism--has also motivated Soviet disarmament policies, as has fear of an arms race with technologically superior opponents.

For seventy-five years, Communist ideology provided the framework for Soviet disarmament policy. formulation and provided ex post facto justifications for Soviet positions. The most prominent Marxist-Leninist theme concerned the "inevitability of war" between socialism and capitalism. But despite the belief that these opposing social systems would ultimately engage in some final armed confrontation, successive Soviet leaders found reasons and justifications for policies of coexistence with their "bourgeois" opponents. A later, related issue--the perceived inevitability of war with nuclear weapons--grew out of Soviet leader Joseph Stalin's reluctance to acknowledge the revolutionary nature of this new technology for warfare. Once the potential of thermonuclear weapons to destroy all life on earth became obvious, the "inevitability of war" thesis itself required reevaluation. That reassessment began in the mid-1950s, and an even more radical reevaluation took place in the Soviet Union under Mikhail Gorbachev in the mid-1980s.

Soviet Communist ideology influenced the public presentation of arms control and disarmament proposals. The Soviet Union often engaged in "disarmament diplomacy," such as well-timed negotiating concessions to achieve political goals unrelated to disarmament. Due to this tendency, as well as the need to publicly support socialist values, Soviet disarmament proposals could be divided into two categories: "declaratory disarmament" for propaganda purposes, and policies pursued for actual arms control purposes. These categories sometimes overlapped, but, in general, serious proposals tended to be specific and to advocate "partial disarmament" measures (chastichnoe razoruzhenie) rather than "general and complete disarmament" (vseobshchee i polnoe razoruzhenie).

Until the mid-1980s a long-standing and thinly disguised goal of Soviet policy was the removal of U.S. influence in Europe and the division of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). Another enduring theme was preventing Germany from acquiring nuclear weapons--an imperative derived from historical and geographical factors rather than ideology.


Arms Control and Disarmament Before the Bolshevik Revolution

During the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Russia participated in several attempts to limit armaments and war. In 1816, Britain rejected Tsar Alexander I's proposal for a mutual reduction of military forces because British leaders saw no evidence that Russia was ready to demobilize. Tsar Alexander II achieved more success. The Declaration of Saint Petersburg, signed in 1868, codified humanitarian principles for the conduct of war and banned explosive projectiles lighter than 400 grams (14 ounces). The destruction of enemy military forces was declared to be the only acceptable war goal.

In 1898, Tsar Nicholas II appealed for an international disarmament conference, which resulted in the first Hague Conference in 1899. The tsar argued that the cost of the arms race, and its immorality, demanded disarmament. The conference achieved no actual arms reductions, but the laws of land warfare were codified and expanding (or so-called "dumdum") bullets were banned. At the Hague Conference of 1907, also called by Nicholas II, the laws of war were again addressed, as was the prohibition of poison gas and arms capable of inflicting "unnecessary suffering." The Saint Petersburg declaration of 1868 was reaffirmed at both conferences.


Lenin, Stalin, and Plans for General and Complete Disarmament, 1917-1953

Before the Russian Revolution, Bolshevik leader Vladimir Lenin characterized disarmament proposals as counterrevolutionary, useful only as a means of exploiting weaknesses in the opposing camp. According to Lenin, disarmament endangered socialism because its pacifist sentiments weakened the revolutionary spirit required to defeat the aggressive policies of capitalism.

After the Revolution of 1917, Lenin suggested that disarmament could secure a much-needed "breathing space" (peredyshka) for the war-weary Soviet Union while at the same time serving other goals. Promoting cooperation through disarmament meant that more time and energy could be devoted to gaining control over a chaotic domestic situation, consolidating the Bolsheviks' hold on power, and extricating the Soviet Union from World War I. If "peaceful coexistence" (mirnoe sosushchestvovanie) was unlikely, perhaps at least "peaceful cohabitation" (mirnoe sozhitel'stvo) could be achieved. Lenin believed that war between capitalism and socialism was inevitable, but he allowed for the possibility of "temporary coexistence."

This view was necessary after 1917 to justify the numerous international treaties and agreements that Soviet Russia negotiated with its neighbors. For example, in the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk (1918), which marked the end of Soviet participation in World War I, Soviet Russia made substantial territorial concessions to Germany and its allies so that the new Bolshevik regime could concentrate on the Russian Civil War.

Joseph Stalin, who became first secretary of the Soviet Communist party--and thus the de facto leader of the country--in 1922, also believed in irreconcilable differences between socialism and capitalism. But as more sophisticated analyses of the West developed, Stalin and others foresaw opportunities to exploit divisions within capitalist countries. Disarmament became a tactical tool for this purpose.

Between 1920 and 1924--after two revolutionary wars (1905 and 1917), humiliating defeat in the Russo-Japanese War (1904-1905), World War I (1914-1918), the civil war (1918-1921), and a disastrous war with Poland (1920)--the Soviet Union conducted its largest ever unilateral demobilization of army personnel. The drastic reduction, from 5.5 million to 550,000 men, was intended as an adaptation to peacetime conditions and the devastated domestic economy. Regular or cadre forces were supplemented with a territorial-militia system, and national units were allowed in the republics. A comprehensive military reform plan was implemented between 1924 and 1928. Troop levels did not rise again until 1931, reaching 2 million in 1936.


General and Complete Disarmament Proposals, 1920s-1930s

Georgi Chicherin, who served as people's commissar for foreign affairs from 1918 to 1930, and Maxim Litvinov, who held the post from 1930 to 1939, actively engaged the Soviet Union in the European disarmament process and proposed four major general and complete disarmament (GCD) plans. Lenin and Stalin showed little interest in such proposals.

In 1921 the Soviet application to attend the International Conference on Naval Limitation in Washington, D.C., was rejected, to great consternation. (The Soviet Union was invited to the second Washington conference in 1935.) The first significant international conference attended by the Soviets was the Genoa Conference of 1922. Although Genoa was largely an economic conference concerned with post--World War I reconstruction, and the Soviet interest was to obtain large loans from the capitalist powers and to encourage economic measures favorable to the Soviet Union, Chicherin nonetheless discussed general disarmament. His suggestion that the Red Army would disband if other countries also disarmed was rejected, but the Soviet government viewed the introduction of disarmament at Genoa as a partial success for their new diplomacy. Genoa was also important as a forum for Lenin to proclaim the principle of peaceful coexistence.

In December 1922, Litvinov (then Chicherin's deputy) invited the Soviet Union's eastern European neighbors to Moscow for the first disarmament conference after World War I. Litvinov wanted to reduce the economic burden of armaments and discuss mutual reductions. The Soviet government offered to reduce its army to 200,000 troops, establish a demilitarized zone on its borders, and cut its military budget, but the conference failed because other countries refused to match these concessions. In what was to become a pattern in Soviet disarmament negotiations of the 1920s and 1930s, the Soviet Union scored political points by demonstrating that its neighbors had no intention of actually disarming. The Soviets' professed willingness to begin demobilizing made it more difficult for the opponents of socialism to justify increased military expenditures by raising the specter of the Bolshevik threat.

Though the covenant of the League of Nations went into effect in 1920, the Soviet Union did not gain formal entry until 1934. The Soviet government, fearing that the League would become an anti-Communist coalition and intervene in the Russian Civil War, initially opposed the League and the Versailles Treaty that led to its creation. Yet the Soviet Union was associated with various bodies of the League and ratified the 1925 Geneva Protocol prohibiting the use of chemical and biological weapons in war.

At the fourth session of the League's Preparatory Commission of the Disarmament Conference in 1927 (the Soviet Union had not attended the first three sessions of these discussions, begun in 1926), Litvinov presented a detailed GCD proposal for complete dissolution of all land, sea, and air forces and their bases; the destruction of all weapon systems; the abolition of military service; and the disbanding of all military budgets and military ministries. The GCD plan was not discussed until the fifth session of the Preparatory Commission in March 1928, where Litvinov resubmitted it as a "Draft Convention on Immediate, Complete, and General Disarmament." He argued it was easier to establish "control" or verification measures for general, rather than partial, disarmament. The Soviet plan received only Turkish and German support. The plan was rejected by the Preparatory Commission, and the Soviets then submitted a plan for partial disarmament that involved proportional cuts in troop levels, combat aircraft, and navies. The plan was not given serious consideration because the troop cuts were thought to favor the Soviet Union.

In 1927, a Red Army interdepartmental commission studying disarmament determined that any clear distinction between offensive and defensive weapons was untenable for military technological reasons. Soviet proposals therefore continued to emphasize quantitative disarmament.

In August 1928, the Kellogg-Briand Pact renouncing war as an instrument of national policy was signed by fifteen nations in Paris. International disagreements were henceforth to be decided only by peaceful means. The Soviet Union, invited to sign only after the formal ceremony in Paris, ratified the agreement, but submitted reservations with its note of adherence. Despite Litvinov's view that the Kellogg-Briand Pact was virtually useless, in February 1929 the Soviet Union signed a similar agreement renouncing war (the East Protocol or the "Litvinov pact") with Poland, Romania, Latvia, and Estonia.

In 1932, under League of Nations auspices, the World Conference for the REduction and Limitation of Armaments was convened. Issues addressed by delegates included the establishment of a collective security plan; limiting armed forces, armaments, defense budgets, and arms manufacture; and developing control measures to implement and enforce an agreement. An attempt was made to define qualitative (versus quantitative) disarmament, including efforts to distinguish offensive from defensive weapons. Data on military budgets and armed forces were exchanged.

Litvinov proposed another GCD plan that was rejected by the conference. There was some Soviet support for qualitative disarmament (air forces, heavy mobile artillery, light and medium tanks, submarines, and aircraft carriers were all identified as offensive weapons). Yet the idea was generally rejected in favor of quantitative disarmament. Litvinov suggested that qualitative disarmament would merely establish new methods of war.

By 1934 the League had begun to unravel. Germany, led by Adolf Hitler, withdrew in October 1933 and began to rearm. Disillusionment and frustration about disarmament spread, and the pacifist sentiments and utopian visions of the 1920s receded. League participants, including the Soviet Union, turned to defining "security," but with little success. Ironically, the deterioration in Russian-German relations caused a reevaluation of the League by the Soviet Union, and at this late date the Soviet Union entered the League of Nations. As fear of German aggression grew, Soviet leaders increasingly emphasized collective security and international cooperation with Western powers, and Soviet foreign policy reverted to traditional balance-of-power diplomacy in an attempt to avert another war.


Stalin and Nuclear Weapons, 1945-1953

In August 1945 the first nuclear weapons were dropped on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Soviet press coverage began in September, yet Stalin refused to acknowledge the significance of nuclear weapons and did not mention them publicly until September 1946, when he was quoted in the Soviet newspaper Pravda as saying that "Atomic bombs are meant to frighten those with weak nerves, but they cannot decide the fate of wars since atomic bombs are quite insufficient for that." Nonetheless he realized the power of nuclear weapons and ordered the Soviet atomic energy program to be sped up.

After World War II, Stalin reverted to a disarmament strategy similar to that pursued by Soviet leaders in the 1920s. Grand proposals were made to stall the West while Soviet nuclear programs proceeded. Throughout the 1940s and early 1950s the Soviet Union consistently rejected plans to control the proliferation of atomic energy and weapons. Nor would it acknowledge that nuclear fuel developed ostensibly for peaceful purposes could be used to power atomic weapons.

At the first meeting of the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) in January 1946 the United Nations Atomic Energy Commission (UNAEC) was established. In the resolution proposing the commission, the elimination of atomic weapons was identified as an urgent task. A year later the U.N. Commission for Conventional Armaments (CCA) was established at Soviet insistence. However, in keeping with their contention that atomic weapons were not qualitatively different from conventional weapons, the Soviets refused to consider either class of weapons independently, and consequently the CCA accomplished little.

In June 1946 the United States presented the Baruch Plan to the UNAEC. The proposal, developed by U.S. statesman Barnard Baruch, called for the elimination of existing atomic weapons and stringent controls on nuclear facilities. The Soviet Union rejected it, arguing that it would compromise national sovereignty, although the Soviets' real interest was development of their own nuclear potential. Moscow continued to call for prohibition of the manufacture and use of nuclear weapons, but not nuclear research. On 29 October 1946 the Soviet U.N. delegation bitterly attacked the Baruch Plan, characterizing it as a means of giving the United States a monopoly on nuclear weapons, and submitted a "Proposal Concerning the General Reduction of Armaments." This rather vague resolution recommended banning the military use of nuclear fuel and called upon nations to provide the U.N. with information regarding their weapons and armed forces. The proposal was strongly criticized, particularly by the United States, and then rejected.

Finally, the Baruch Plan required an amendment of the U.N. Security Council veto procedures so that a majority vote could enforce penalties against violators. The Soviet Union adamantly rejected this, fearing it could be used to organize other military activities against the Soviet Union, particularly by the United States.

In 1948 the Soviet Union proposed to the U.N. Security Council that the permanent council members (the United States, the Soviet Union, Great Britain, France, and China) reduce land, air, and naval forces by one-third, renounce atomic weapons, and establish an international control body to enforce compliance with these measures. The proposal still emphasized the coupling of nuclear and conventional forces, which at that time was not acceptable to the United States. A U.S. counterproposal in 1949 was rejected by the Soviet Union, and by the next year the UNAEC effectively ceased to function. In 1952 it was merged with the CAA to form the Disarmament Commission (DC). The Soviets also established a pattern of rejecting U.S. stipulations that weapon sites be inspected before disarmament agreements went into effect (Moscow equated such inspections with espionage). In 1948 and 1949 Soviet and United States counterproposals floundered on this issue.

Behind Soviet protestations over controls on nuclear energy was the fear that, because many Western proposals involved AEC ownership and operation of national nuclear energy industries to guard against weapon production, these plans could lead to Western control of nuclear fuel, Soviet industry, and thereby the Soviet economy.

Rejection of an international control system also shielded the development of Soviet nuclear capabilities. Moscow continued to vigorously pursue nuclear research, and the Soviets tested an atomic weapon in 1949 and a hydrogen bomb in 1953. By 1954-1955 long-range bombers could reach the United States, and in August 1957 the Soviets successfully fired an intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM).

At the time of Stalin's death in 1953 little had been accomplished in disarmament. U.S. efforts to control atomic energy had failed, the Cold War was underway, the Soviet Union had installed itself in eastern Europe, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) had been created, and Soviet plans for GCD were viewed as increasingly anachronistic.


Khrushchev, Brezhnev, and the Shift Toward Partial Arms Control, 1954-1968

By 1954, as the Soviet Union added nuclear weapons to its arsenal, Soviet strategists began to address the threat of surprise attack from long-range nuclear delivery systems. In principle, Soviet military policy seemed to reject the concept of nuclear deterrence (in which one side possessed enough nuclear weapons to discourage the other side from attacking), yet in practice, probably by 1956, Moscow subscribed to a nuclear doctrine of massive retaliation (the threat to inflict massive destruction in response to even a limited nuclear attack).

On the other side of the debate were those Soviet officials who maintained that a nuclear war would be an unparalleled catastrophe. On 13 March 1954, Premier Georgi Malenkov stated in the Soviet journal Pravda that nuclear war "would mean the destruction of world civilization." Nikita Khrushchev, who led the Soviet Union from 1958 to 1964, initially cited the Communist party line that a nuclear war would be fatal only to capitalism and its proponents, but Khrushchev ultimately conceded that nuclear war would be devastating to socialism and capitalism alike. At the Twentieth Party Congress of the Communist party in February 1956, Khrushchev officially rejected the inevitability of war thesis, envisioning instead a peaceful worldwide transition to socialism. The principle of peaceful coexistence was officially adopted.

A second debate on military doctrine began in 1960, when Khrushchev announced that future wars would likely be waged with nuclear weapons. By promoting the buildup of nuclear stockpiles and playing down the importance of conventional armed forces, the Soviet leader bluffed the United States into believing that a serious "missile gap" existed (this so-called gap was later proved to be fictitious).

The publication of Marshal V. D. Sokolovsky's influential Military Strategy (1962), the first comprehensive review of Soviet military strategy since the reforms of 1926, ignited a new debate on the possibility of limited nuclear war. Conservatives, responding to Sokolovsky's suggestion that the most likely cause of a global war was a Western surprise attack, argued that it was "moral disarmament" for the military to exclude the possibility of victory in war, even nuclear war. Some analysts favored the development of anti-ballistic missile (ABM) systems (capable of stopping incoming missiles) to increase survivability in nuclear war. Others, such as General Nicolai Talensky, argued that it was dangerous to think that a nuclear war was survivable. Talensky and others advocated ABMS to stabilize the nuclear balance and protect Soviet territory.


Khruschev and the Reorientation of Soviet Disarmament Policies

Under Khrushchev, disarmament became an actual strategic goal rather tan a tactic, setting the scene for the first significant arms control agreements between the major powers since the Russian Revolution.

Unlike GCD plans, whcih were drawn up primarily to serve political purposes, partial disarmament became important and was given high priority for national security reasons. The Soviet Union especially wanted to decrease the likelihood of a surprise nuclear attack against Moscow. There was also an overriding concern with preventing Germany from gaining nuclear weapons, particularly after NATO began to acquire tactical nuclear weapons in 1954, and the West agreed to German rearmament in 1955. In addition, the Soviets were interested in decreasing U.S. influence in Europe, undermining justification for U.S. foreign bases, and preventing U.S. allies from acquiring nuclear weapons. Finally, the Soviet Union sought to discourage an all-out arms race, especially while establishing its own nuclear potential.


Revival of Soviet GCD Plans

Throughout the 1950s the Soviet Union promted geneal and complete diarmament, picking up where it had left off in the early 1930s. Between 1954 and 1962 at least six major GCD plans were put forward, all of which proposed eradication of nuclear weapons and their delivery systems, and elimination of foreign bases. The latter became important when Germany joined NATO and U.S. force reestablished themselves in Europe; it made little sense to the Soviets to destroy nuclear delivery systems while allowing the Americans to maintain conventional bombers in Europe.

One of the most comprehensive GCD plans, submitted to the Disarmament Commission's sub-committee in 1955, conceded that nuclear and conventional diarmament could be sequential rather than simultaneous. This signified movement toward an acceptance of partial-disarmament mearsures. Moscow also acknowledged the importance of inspection, especially for nuclear-weapon reductions.

The Soviet plan adopted the Wester idea of reducing armed forces to 1-1.5 million for the Soviet Union, the United States and China, and proportional reduction for other countries. It is also called for the prohibition of nuclear weapons after conventional weapons had been cut by 75 percent; observers to monitor troop movements and guard against surprise attakck; the elimination of foreign bases. The proposal was discussed at the Geneva Summit Conference in 1955, but failed to win Western approval. The Soviets, in turn, rejected a United States plan that would have required the superpowers to exchange information about their armed forces and military installlations. In the Soviet view this was "control without disarmament," and both parties abandoned what may have been the last and the most realistic chance to achieve GCD. The Soviets continued to promote grand disarmament schemes well into the 1960s, but as time went on their propoganda function increased while any hope of meaningful results decreased.

At Geneva, the Soviet Union also rejected U.S. President Dwight D. Eisenhower's "open skies" proposals for reciprocal aerial inspections to guard against surprise attack. Moscow, maintaining that open skies amounted to little more than legitimized espionage, suggested that instead the threat of surprise attack could be reduced by a system of control posts at ports and borders. In 1956 the Soviets agreed to allow aerial surveillance up to a depth of 800 kilometers (480 miles) inside the territory of the Warsaw Treaty Organization (WTO, the eastern European counterpart to NATO), but the United States continued to insist on a more comprehensive inspection policy.

Also in 1956 the Soviets presented a plan for a zone of limited armaments in central Europe, including a denuclearized zone in East and West Germany and detailed inspection measures; cessation of nuclear tests, though without inspections of Soviet territory; and 15 percent reductions in military budgets. These measures were rejected by the United States, but when the Disarmament Commission subcommittee met in 1957 the Soviet Union and the United States became much more specific in their proposals. The Soviet Union relaxed its insistence on a comprehensive GCD and complete elimination of foreign bases, and accepted the Western proposal to exchange arms information. In the continued attempt to ban nuclear weapons to Soviets proposed a two-stage plan: stage 1 required all nations to pledge not to use nuclear weapons, and stage 2 prohibited production of nuclear weapons and mandated the destruction of existing stockpiles. Howeever, when the West deemed this and subsequent proposals as impracticable, Moscow announced that it would no longer attend sessions of the Disarmament Commission subcommittee. At Soviet insistence the DC was reconstituted to include the full U.N. membership, but neither this forum nor the ten-nation disarmament committee formed by the Foreign Ministers' Conference in 1960 proved effective, and disarmament discussions did not resume until the formation of the Eighteen Nation Disarmament Committee (ENDC) in 1961.

Nonetheless, Khrushchev himself carried on the campaign for GCD in the U.N. In September 1959, at the fourteenth General Assembly, he presented another draft GCD treaty. Similar to the 1955 proposal, it advocated some partial-disarmament measures, such as nuclear-weapon-free zones (NWFZS, areas where nuclear weapons could not be deployed) and a control and inspection zone in central Europe; measures for the prevention of a surprise attack; and a nonaggression pact between NATO and the Warsaw Treaty Organization. (This plan was presented again in June 1960 with few differences.) The eventual United States acceptance of GCD, coupled with Moscow's blatant refusal to consider Western GCD ideas, served to undercut the effectiveness of GCD as a Soviet political tool.

In 1962 the Soviet Union presented yet another draft GCD treaty--this time to the Eighteen Nation Disarmament Committee--offering steep cuts in Red Army forces but still demanding elimination of foreign bases. Andrei Gromyko, who became Soviet foreign minister in 1957, also accepted the need for some kind of "nuclear umbrella" (a minimum-deterrent force) under a GCD plan. Equally important was the emphasis on partial-disarmament measures, which had already superseded GCD in importance.

Ironically, just as GCD seemed about to go into eclipse, the Soviet Union and the United States signed the McCloy-Zorin Agreement of 1961, a joint statement on the principles of disarmament that included a GCD definition. The agreement stressed that states should possess only the non-nuclear forces sufficient to maintain internal order and protect the personal security of citizens--presaging the concept of reasonable sufficiency, or minimum-force levels, developed under Gorbachev.


Khrushchev's Unilateral Reductions

As the Soviet Union worked toward achieving a credible nuclear deterrent, Khrushchev radically cut conventional forces. Between 1955 and 1958 the Soviet military was reduced by more than 2 million troops, to 3,600,000 men; conventional armaments were cut; and shipbuilding programs were halted. Khrushchev declared that the navy and air force had lost much of their relevance, and in December 1959 a secret meeting of the Central Committee of the Communist party approved a further one-third demobilization of Soviet forces. This was to be implemented in 1960 when the Supreme Soviet (the Soviet legislature) announced a unilateral reduction of the armed forces down to 2,400,000 men over two years.

The Soviet high command objected to the 1960 reductions and ensured that they were never fully realized. Despite this, in December 1963 Krushchev announced a reduction in the military budget and the possibility of further cutbacks in the armed forces. The military, in addition to opposing these plans, also objected to arms control initiatives and a test ban.


The 1960s and Partial Disarmament

By the early 1960s the Soviet Union possessed its own nuclear deterrent, and a new détente would soon develop with the West. Soviet leaders had come to believe that arms control and disarmament, rather than being a betrayal of socialism or a sign of weakness, could promote socialism by demonstrating Soviet leadership. GCD had proven unworkable, but the total-disarmament discussions of the past decade had laid the groundwork for progress on partial disarmament. Moscow was now concerned with three issues: containing U.S. strategic developments to protect the evolving Soviet nuclear potential; thwarting nuclear proliferation; and averting accidental war.

In 1955, in an attempt to control nuclear proliferation to Soviet adversaries, Moscow began pushing for a nuclear test ban. U.S. strategic superiority. was a constant threat; Britain carried out its first hydrogen bomb test in 1956; and Moscow feared that West Germany and China might acquire nuclear weapons.

The Soviet Union also had an interest in preserving certain aspects of testing so that its own strategic programs could compete with Western developments. Soviet test-ban advocacy was also significant because, first, it indicated that Moscow would negotiate partial-disarmament measures instead of linking all arms control to GCD; and, second, it gave the Soviet Union an opportunity to cultivate Western public opinion, which strongly favored a ban, especially on atmospheric testing.

Perhaps because they were the first serious efforts at partial arms control, the test-ban discussions were lengthy and complicated and extended over eight years. Ironically, it was Western countries that linked a test ban to progress on other areas of arms control and refused to drop this linkage until 1959. In 1960 the Soviets briefly reverted to linking a test ban to a GCD agreement, but in general they strongly criticized Western linkage on this issue.

The first detailed test-ban discussions, at a Geneva Conference of Experts beginning in 1958, settled some verification issues. A tripartite conference between the Soviet Union, the United States, and Britain between 1958 and 1962 discussed a ban, followed by discussions in the Eighteen Nation Disarmament Committee. Intensive bilateral negotiations also took place between the Soviet Union and the United States.

The Soviet Union favored a comprehensive test ban (CTB) from the beginning. However Moscow also argued that a limited test ban (LTB) would be equally useful and was the first to promote the idea in 1956. In April 1959, and each successive year until 1963, the Soviet Union proposed an LTB with no limits on underground testing. This was consistently rejected by the West, which did not move away from the idea of a CTB until 1958.

From early on the Soviets promoted uninspected nuclear-test moratoriums. In order to increase opposition to testing, the Soviet Union carried out a unilateral moratorium between March 1958 and September 1961. The moratorium had ended in October 1958, but when the United States and Britain joined the voluntary test ban the same month, the Soviet Union reinstated its moratorium. Even after the Soviets resumed vigorous testing in the fall of 1961 they continued to promote moratoriums as a method for controlling testing. However, disagreement about moratorium length, and the West's desire to reinforce any test ban with a treaty, made this unfeasible. In August 1963, two months after President John F. Kennedy announced U.S. willingness to accept less than a comprehensive test ban, a limited nuclear test-ban treaty, which would only require verification by national technical means, was signed in Moscow.

The desire to thwart the spread of nuclear weapons to West Germany and China, as well as fears about accidental nuclear war, spurred Soviet interest in the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT). The Soviet Union initially shared nuclear technology with China, but as relations deteriorated in the late 1950s it withdrew support amid concern about acquisition of nuclear weapons by politically unpredictable states, or by states aligned with the United States. Such developments, Soviet strategists reasoned, might disrupt the established nuclear balance and increase the likelihood that a limited nuclear war would escalate into a full-scale Armageddon.

During the 1960s the Soviet Union had made it clear that it had no interest in freezing or reducing its stockpiles of strategic nuclear weapons until it could be reassured that non-nuclear states would not acquire weapons of mass destruction. Once it had signed the NPT in 1968, however, the Soviet Union agreed to Strategic Arms Limitation Talks (SALT), after several years of stalling. There were other reasons for Soviet acceptance of SALT at that time, but at least one factor was the desire to demonstrate sincerity in controlling "vertical proliferation" of nuclear weapons (growing stockpiles in nuclear states) to increase pressure on "horizontal proliferators" (non-nuclear states striving to become nuclear) to sign the NPT. After West Germany signed the NPT, Soviet interest in controlling nuclear proliferation noticeably declined.

Soviet proposals for regional disarmament, most notably proposals for nuclear-weapon-free zones and zones of peace (ZOP), also began during this period. In the 1950s the Soviet Union had suggested NWFZS or ZOP for the Baltics, the Nordic countries, the Balkans, Africa, the Far East, central Europe, and the Mediterranean. Although not always without strategic significance, most Soviet NWFZ and ZOP proposals tended to be crude tactical attempts to create public opposition to nuclear proliferation, counter Western nuclear deployments, and promote the Soviet Union as a "peace-loving" state. For example, Moscow's suggestion in the late 1950s that an NWFZ be established in the Far East was motivated by Soviet concerns about a Chinese nuclear bomb. Similarly, the Soviet Union advocated an NWFZ in central Europe to discourage German acquisition of nuclear weapons. A Polish initiative in October 1957 called the Rapacki Plan (named after Polish Foreign Minister Adam Rapacki), which proposed such a zone in central Europe, was viewed favorably by the Soviet Union.

More substantial agreement on regional disarmament was reached in a series of treaties banning nuclear explosions and limiting the militarization, nuclear or otherwise, of remote geographical regions. The Antarctic Treaty was signed in 1959 with little debate, followed by the Outer Space Treaty in 1967 and the Seabed Treaty in 1971. The treaties were as significant for their demonstration of superpower rapprochement and political goodwill as they were for preserving the peaceful use of these regions. In general, the treaties were not contentious because of their low military cost and potentially high political value. The Soviet Union objected mildly to the Outer Space Treaty on the ground that banning weapons in space should occur under a plan for GCD, but a more likely explanation was that in the late 1950s, Moscow had begun testing its first intercontinental ballistic missiles. By 1963, however, when the U.N. General Assembly unanimously adopted a resolution that provided the basis for the treaty, the Soviet Union was ready to add its signature.


Brezhnev, Détente, and the era of Arms Control

After Khrushchev's removal as first secretary of the Communist party in 1964, and replacement by Leonid Brezhnev, arms control was temporarily deemphasized and there was a return to more general GCD plans as the official goal of Soviet foreign policy. For example, in July 1968, soon after the United States, the Soviet Union, and almost five dozen other nations had signed the NPT, Brezhnev submitted the "Memorandum of the Soviet Government Concerning Urgent Measures to Stop the Arms Race and Achieve Disarmament" to the U.N In reality, however, while the promotion of comprehensive disarmament goals was consistent with Communist ideology, partial disarmament and bilateral negotiations had become the practical route toward arms control.


Détente, Deterrence, and Arms Limitation in the 1970s

Brezhnev institutionalized the idea of peaceful coexistence in the concept of superpower détente. He wanted more than the old-style peaceful coexistence, and spoke about a "no-war system" with a legal means of outlawing force as an instrument of national policy. In 1971 Brezhnev unveiled a comprehensive "program of peace" based on disarmament and cooperation with the West. By the mid-1970s there was an internal debate about the nature of international relations, including the possibility of making détente permanent and war an anachronism.

The concept of peaceful coexistence, now inseparable from the idea of détente, included formal renunciation of strategic superiority. Strategic parity with the United States was accepted and Soviet pronouncements and writings ceased to claim superiority as an aim at the Twenty-fourth Congress of the Communist party of the Soviet Union in 1971. Soviet policy statements referred to peaceful coexistence throughout the 1970s and 1980s.

The Soviet military, which worried about a surprise nuclear attack for much of the 1960s, continued until 1971 to debate the wisdom of "seizing the nuclear initiative" if threatened by the West. (A preemptive attack to forestall a nuclear strike on the Soviet Union was probably ruled out after the 1950s.) By the mid-1970s, the emphasis in military writing had shifted from limited nuclear war to European conventional-war plans. By the early 1980s writings and political statements stressed the catastrophic affects of nuclear war and rejected limited nuclear-war options.

Though the Soviets seemed to accept mutual deterrence as a fact, they never officially adopted Western terminology, instead translating the phrase as "intimidation" (ustrashenie). This contrasted with the Soviet idea of deterrence based on "restraint" or "defense against an opponent" (sderzhivanie or oborona). The Soviet version of mutual deterrence, generally referred to as "deterrence by denial" (versus the Western concept of "deterrence by punishment"), rested on an "assured retaliatory capability," that is, on demonstrating the capability to retaliate at all levels of nuclear escalation, while eschewing aggressive intentions. Many Soviet military analysts argued that effective deterrence, which depended on convincing an opponent that the Soviet Union was able and willing to fight and win a nuclear war, required nuclear preparedness.


Soviet Motivations for the SALT Negotiations

Bilateral arms control became the main means of establishing a new, lasting détente between East and West. Strategic Arms Limitation Talks, the centerpiece of United States-Soviet relations in the 1970s, offered an important political opportunity to improve a relationship negatively affected by the Vietnam War and the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968, and to codify ground rules for managing dealings between the superpowers.

Several other factors motivated Soviet interest in bilateral arms control. Achievement of a rough strategic parity with the United States was critical, as was recognition of the Soviet Union's equal superpower status with the United States. These made peaceful superpower competition possible without either the threat of war or fear of U.S. coercion. (It has been estimated that by 1970 the Soviet Union possessed 1,300 ICBMS, 280 submarine-launched ballistic missiles [SLBMS], and 150 long-range bombers; while the United States possessed 1,054 ICBMS, 656 SLBMS, and 550 long-range bombers.) Moscow also wanted to stabilize the arms race and conceded that continued investment in new weapons systems would be economically and militarily counterproductive. Economically, the Soviet Union acknowledged its need for advanced technology, scientific expertise, and trade with the West. Militarily, "assured destruction" could be undermined by the development of new offensive and defensive weapons. Multiple independently targetable reentry vehicles (MIRVS) and ABM systems already threatened to destabilize the strategic balance by 1970.

Finally, détente and arms control would theoretically allow the Soviet Union to pursue other commitments, such as expanding its influence in the third world. In the Soviet view, peaceful coexistence and de'aatente included both cooperation and competition, thus allowing for continuation of Marxist-Leninist ideals of "class struggle" and promotion of the "world socialist cause."


SALT I and II: The Success of Bilateral Arms Control

Despite initial hesitation about the U.S. offer in June 1968 to begin Strategic Arms Limitation Talks, Moscow accepted. The beginning of negotiations was postponed until November 1969, after the Soviet intervention in Czechoslovakia.

Throughout the SALT I negotiations Soviet interest lay primarily with an ABM agreement. The Soviets had been developing ABMS since the early 1960s, but deployment of a nationwide ABM system had failed. Though an unsophisticated system was in place around Moscow by the end of the 1960s, some Soviet military and civilian analysts believed that extensive Soviet ABM deployment and superpower competition were unwise. ABM limits were strongly favored when SALT I began, especially to thwart further U.S. ABM efforts.

Soviet acceptance of a U.S. proposal to limit ABM sites to the National Command Authority (NCA) facilitated rapid agreement on an ABM treaty The final treaty, presented in May 1972, allowed for the deployment of ABMS to protect one NCA site (a capital city or a major military installation) and one ICBM site on each side. It also banned development, testing, and deployment of all ABM systems and launchers, including so-called exotic ABM systems.

Offensive limitations were more difficult. The Soviets initially envisioned a temporary and informal arrangement before a more comprehensive agreement, whereas the Americans wanted a formal, legally binding treaty. MIRS immediately became a problem. Lagging in MIRV technology (the United States began deployment in 1970), the Soviets initially wanted to ban them. The issue was finally postponed to SALT II, by which time Soviet MIRV technology had progressed significantly. At the Soviets' insistence, discussions about mobile ICBMS were also left for SALT II.

Considerable debate was focused on America's forward-based systems (FBSS), including bombers in Europe and on aircraft carriers that could be used to attack Soviet territory. The Soviets, who had no FBS equivalent, dropped this contentious issue late in SALT I, only after they had received tacit "compensation" that allowed them to keep 1,618 to the U.S.'s 1,054 ICBM launchers. Strategic bombers, in which the Americans had a threefold lead, were excluded from the agreement.

The Soviets initially rejected U.S. proposals for a submarine-launched ballistic-missile freeze, and later demanded "geographical compensation" because of the transit time needed for their submarines to travel from port to sea. SALT I limited the Soviet Union to 950 SLBM launchers (and 62 submarines), and the United States to 710 SLBM launchers (and 44 ballistic-missile submarines). This involved a buildup, rather than a reduction, of forces.

Concurrent with SALT, other bilateral negotiations between the Soviet Union and the United States resulted in two pacts that went into effect in September 1971: the so-called Hot Line Modernization Agreement to improve the United States-Soviet direct communications link (updating the 1963 "Hot Line" Agreement), and an agreement to guard against nuclear accidents. The Prevention of Nuclear War Agreement was signed in 1973.

The ABM Treaty and the Interim Offensive Agreement and Protocol (SALT I agreement) were signed in Moscow on 26 May 1972 after two years of negotiations. At the SALT II talks, which began in November 1972 and continued for seven years, many SALT I issues were re-argued, including quantitative and qualitative restraints on ICBMS, SLBMS, strategic bombers, MIRVS, long-range cruise missiles, mobile missiles, and forward-based systems.

At SALT II, as at SALT I, Moscow focused on limiting new and potentially destabilizing weapons systems. The Soviet Union, with 70 to 75 percent of its strategic forces on land-based ICBMS, worried about U.S. MIRV technology and improvements in sea-based strategic forces, the superior U.S. strategic bomber force, long-range cruise missiles, theater nuclear forces, and plans for new ICBMS such as the MX missile. A year into the negotiations, the Soviets expressed concern about the Schlesinger Doctrine (developed by President Richard M. Nixon's secretary of defense James Schlesinger in late 1973), which Moscow interpreted as a strategy for fighting a limited nuclear war. (The doctrine advocated "selective targeting" of Soviet command centers and missile sites.) As a countermeasure the Soviets improved their ICBM forces, and by 1978 almost all their ICBMS were MIRV ed, including some SLBMS. Throw-weight (the missiles' delivery power) and accuracy improved considerably, and the country's civil defense program was modernized and expanded.

SALT II began slowly. To stop U.S. development of the B-1 bomber and Trident nuclear submarine, the Soviets suggested a "freeze" in new weapons technologies. The Americans countered that MIRV development should be included in any weapons freeze, at which point the Soviets dropped their proposal. Because they intended to deploy MIRVS on new heavy strategic missiles (the SS-17 and SS-19), Moscow insisted that its MIRV program be allowed to proceed unimpeded and that throw-weight not be limited to disallow these systems.

The SALT II negotiators made little progress until November 1974 when Brezhnev and U.S. President Gerald Ford, at a summit meeting in Vladivostok in the Soviet Union, outlined a tentative agreement in which each nation would be limited to a total of 2,400 missile launchers (called strategic delivery vehicles and consisting of ICBMS, SLBMS, and bombers) and 1,320 MIRVS. A definition of strategic weapons remained problematic. The Soviets denied that their new bomber, code-named "Backfire" by NATO, had intercontinental capabilities, and the Americans rejected Soviet claims that new long-range U.S. cruise missiles were strategic weapons.

Prior to Vladivostok the Soviets insisted on compensation for U.S forward-based systems, while refusing to factor in their own shorter and intermediate-range nuclear weapons as part of a weapons-balancing equation because these weapons could not reach U.S. territory. If it was Soviet political strategy to use forward-based systems to create divisions within NATO, such a strategy was probably attenuated by fears that a withdrawal of U.S. nuclear forces in Europe might itself stimulate development of a European nuclear force. After Vladivostok the forward-based systems issue was quietly dropped.

The SALT II Treaty, signed in June 1979 amid a deteriorating détente, was never ratified by the U.S. Senate. Limits on ICBMS, SLBMS, and strategic bombers were set at the Vladivostok levels and sublimits restricted MIRVS. Bombers with cruise missiles were counted as MIRV--like weapons. In the Treaty Protocol land- and sea-based cruise missiles and mobile ICBMS were banned until the last day of 1981. The Soviet Backfire bomber was not formally limited, but in a letter to U.S. President Jimmy Carter, Brezhnev guaranteed that the Soviet Union would limit construction to thirty per year. Verification was to be done by national technical means (primarily reconnaissance satellites) thereby sidestepping onsite inspections for the Soviet Union again. An official SALT II communiqué rejected the pursuit of missile superiority, reinforcing the notion that parity would be the goal of each side.


The Early 1980s and the Failure of Bilateral Arms Control

The Soviet intervention in Afghanistan in late 1979, the suppression of the Solidarity movement in Poland in 1980-1981, and the destruction of a Korean Airlines passenger jet by Soviet air force planes in 1983, coupled with the confrontational polemics of U.S. President Ronald Reagan, who took office in January 1981, and the U.S. interventions in Grenada, Nicaragua, El Salvador, and Lebanon in the early 1980s, sent superpower relations plunging to what may have been their lowest point in the history of the Cold War. Nonetheless, Strategic Arms Reductions Talks (START; the new name stressed arms reduction instead of limitation) opened in Geneva in June 1982, but these parleys were hampered by a series of Soviet leadership changes after Brezhnev's death in November 1982 (Yuri Andropov, who succeeded Brezhnev, died in February 1984; the next Soviet leader, Constantin Chernenko, died in March 1985, at which time Mikhail Gorbachev was named head of the Soviet Communist party).

The Reagan administration vehemently opposed the SALT legacy and intended to use the START talks to rectify past arms control "errors." The Soviets, however, viewed START as a continuation of the SALT process and picked up where SALT II left off, reintroducing unresolved and controversial issues.

Brezhnev's initial proposal--a quantitative "freeze" on strategic weapons, as offered in SALT II--was, as expected, rejected by the United States because a freeze would have limited development of the planned Trident II SLBMS and mobile MX missiles. A second, more serious Soviet plan sought to lower SALT II ceilings to 1,800 strategic delivery vehicles. But as the talks progressed, the Reagan administration's attempt to change the "currency" of the negotiations from strategic delivery vehicles to other areas, such as throw-weight or warheads, confused and angered the Soviets. Moscow reiterated that the SALT agreements allowing them superiority in heavy ICBMS was understood as tacit compensation for American FBSS. Moscow's intent was to lower ceilings only in exchange for no increases in FBSS. They also sought limits on U.S. air-launched cruise missiles (ALCMS) and sea-launched cruise missiles (SLCMS).

From the beginning the Soviets asserted no interest in a START agreement in isolation from an intermediate-range nuclear-force (INF) agreement. (Negotiations on such a treaty had begun in November 1981.) They were concerned about NATO plans to deploy 464 ground-launched cruise missiles (GLCMS) and 108 Pershing II missiles in Europe. The NATO deployments, especially the Pershing II with its short delivery time, were viewed as a serious strategic threat to Soviet territory. The Soviet justification for their own intermediate systems (SS-20s) was modernization and replacement of SS-4 and SS-5 missiles, with the Backfire (TU-26) replacing the Badger (TU-16) aircraft. The SS-20s were also justified as compensation for U.S. FBSS, as well as French and British nuclear forces.

The United States-Soviet INF positions remained far apart through the early 1980s. The 1981 U.S. "zero option" (global elimination of INF) was rejected, although the Soviets later accepted almost this exact proposal under Gorbachev. In 1983 the Soviets wanted to stop any NATO deployment, and insisted that French and British nuclear forces, and U.S. FBSS, be included.

The Soviets' insistence on linking START to the question of ballistic-missile defense (BMD) systems took on new urgency in March 1983, when Reagan announced his strategic defense initiative (SDI)--a $26 billion five-year program to develop a space-based BMD system. The Soviets interpreted "Star Wars," as Reagan's program was dubbed, as an attempt to invalidate the most important arms control pact to date, the ABM Treaty. Seen by Moscow as a direct challenge to the consensus on mutual deterrence established through ten years of negotiations, Star Wars was understood to represent a first-strike threat to the Soviet Union, and a search for strategic superiority by the Americans. The Soviets argued that SDI would accelerate the arms race with competition in defensive and offensive systems. There were also veiled fears that the Soviet Union could not compete economically and technologically with superior U.S. assets.

In November 1983, as NATO INF deployments began, the Soviets walked out of INF and START negotiations. Almost no progress was made in the START and INF negotiations until after 1985, when Reagan was well into his second term and Gorbachev had become the leader of the Soviet Union.


CSCE and MBFR: Success and Failure in Multilateral Negotiations

The Soviet disarmament agenda in the 1970s and early 1980s included broader goals than just control of strategic nuclear weapons. Concurrent with bilateral negotiations Moscow also pressed for a European détente to include the framing of security issues in an all-European context, thereby decreasing U.S. influence in Europe; reducing trade barriers; and putting an end to "bloc politics." Soviet goals were vague, and it is doubtful that they ever desired or expected dissolution of the WTO and NATO. Such utopian plans were contrary to Soviet political and military interests in the region. More realistically, they sought a European security conference to legitimize the territorial and political status quo in central and eastern Europe; reaffirmation of a divided Germany; establishment of détente and cooperation with the rest of Europe; wider access to Western technology and economic resources; the creation of new divisions within NATO; and the ability to influence Western dialogue on, for example, European integration.

At first the Soviet Union wanted to exclude the United States from any European security conference, and Moscow called for the removal of U.S. forces from Europe. However, although the Soviets certainly wanted U.S. nuclear forces out of Europe to ensure that they were unavailable to West Germany, Moscow may have wanted the Americans in Europe to prevent German revanchism. Withdrawal of U.S. forces, some Soviet analysts believed, could create a vacuum in central Europe, possibly precipitating West German acquisition of nuclear weapons.

When the Soviet Union began promoting a European security conference in the 1950s the idea was largely propaganda, closely tied to the status of a divided Germany and West Germany's imminent entry into NATO. The issue was later dropped, and it was left to the eastern Europeans and some smaller western European countries to promote the idea during the 1960s. By 1968 Soviet Foreign Minister Gromyko was again advocating a European security conference in speeches to the U.N. Soviet confidence in its hegemony in eastern Europe was shaken by the liberal reforms in Czechoslovakia in 1968, and the Soviets may have hoped a security conference could help solidify their role in the region. To secure a conference, the Soviet Union dropped demands for the dissolution of the two alliances and agreed to U.S. participation.

Negotiations in the first Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe (CSCE) began in July 1973 and lasted for more than two years. The Soviets had hoped for a short, low-cost agreement on political and economic issues. Instead they had to accept an expanded agenda that included human rights. Nonetheless, an accord called the Final Act, signed in Helsinki, Finland, in August 1975, included agreements on sovereignty, the inviolability of frontiers, the peaceful settlement of disputes, nonintervention in internal affairs, and the non-use of force. These principles satisfied Soviet desires for a recognition of postwar borders and the territorial integrity of the Soviet Union and its allies.

The Final Act also identified confidence-building measures (CBMS, arrangements by which the superpowers conveyed information to each other about their military activities), as potentially significant contributors to security in Europe. Prior notification of large military maneuvers (over 25,000 men) and exchanges of military observers were the main CBMS agreed on at Helsinki, though at Soviet insistence compliance was voluntary. The Soviets believed CBMS were of little significance unless tied to other disarmament measures and general political relations.

At the first CSCE follow-up meeting, held in Belgrade from September 1977 to March 1978, attention was called to poor Soviet performance on CBMS. Not until the second follow-up meeting in Madrid (1980-1983) was agreement in principle reached on establishing new "second-generation" confidence- and security-building measures (CSBMS). The Soviets and French also called for a special conference on military issues and disarmament in Europe. The Soviets wanted this outside of CSCE, probably to isolate security issues from human rights. Delegates to the resulting Conference on Disarmament in Europe (CDE), which convened in Stockholm in 1984, sought to establish militarily significant and politically binding CSBMS. At first the Soviets focused almost exclusively on issues of principle rather than substance; for example, nuclear-weapons-free zones, declarations of non-aggression, non-use of force, and no-first-use of nuclear weapons. In their view, military and technical CBMS could come after such "political CSBMS."

The Soviets' approach to CSCE, as well as to the Mutual and Balanced Force Reduction (MBFR) negotiations, was indicative of their emphasis on general principles and political relations between states. This contrasted with the Western focus on substantive technical issues. The MBFR negotiations resulted from a political trade-off between U.S. participation in the CSCE, in exchange for Soviet participation in MBFR.

Only in May 1971 did Brezhnev announce Soviet willingness to negotiate on conventional forces. The Soviets were unenthusiastic, especially the military. Soviet willingness to participate in MBFR talks, conveyed one day before U.S. congressional consideration of unilateral troop reductions, has been interpreted as evidence of Moscow's interest in retaining U.S. troops in Europe in order to justify continued Soviet troop deployments in eastern Europe. Other motivations included the establishment of a rough military parity at lower levels, for both security and economic reasons, and the constraint of the Bundeswehr (the German army).

The long, tortuous, and ultimately failed MBFR negotiations lasted from January 1973 until February 1989. Compared with conventional-arms reductions achieved in the late 1980s and early 1990s, MBFR proposals seem minimalist. The first Warsaw Treaty Organization proposal sought a 20,000-troop reduction, aimed mainly at the Bundeswehr, although a further 15-percent cut was suggested for later stages. There was no discussion of WTO troop levels, nor of verification. Later Soviet proposals expanded on personnel reductions and accepted NATO proposals for conventional-arms limitations.

Early in MBFR the Soviets insisted that Western strategic superiority outside Europe justified their superiority in conventional forces in the region. In 1976 Brezhnev announced that a rough equality of forces existed between the WTO and NATO. Not until 1978 did the Soviets consider asymmetrical troop reductions, proposing 30,000 for themselves and 13,000 for the United States. At the MBFR talks in 1980, Brezhnev announced that a unilateral withdrawal of 20,000 Soviet troops and 1,000 tanks several months earlier should be matched by proportionate Western reductions.

Limited consensus was achieved in the lengthy negotiations; for example, the negotiators agreed on a 900,000 combined ground- and air-force ceiling (700,000 active duty); reductions in stages, with a substantial withdrawal of Soviet and U.S. forces; and withdrawal of forces to national territories. In 1982 limited on-site inspections were accepted in principle by the Soviets.

Despite these areas of agreement, fundamental differences remained on the number of WTO forces actually in the region; U.S. forward-based symptoms, WTO proposals designed to disproportionately reduce West German forces, and U.S. proposals to reduce Soviet forces; and lack of political will by both sides.


Gorbachev and Radical Disarmament Diplomacy

The ascendancy of Mikhail Gorbachev in 1985 marked the dawn of a new and dramatic era in Soviet arms control history: Gorbachev's disarmament diplomacy, initially seen as a propaganda offensive because it resembled earlier Soviet comprehensive disarmament concepts, was a serious effort to reduce East-West confrontation. Radical arms-reduction proposals--previously unequaled in scope and intensity--resulted in major agreements between 1985 and 1991 on confidence- and security-building measures, intermediate-range nuclear forces, conventional weapons, and START.


Radical Reorientation of Foreign Policy, Military Policy, and Disarmament Objectives

Gorbachev's disarmament diplomacy was based on major foreign policy changes that were approved by the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) and promulgated by the Soviet Foreign Ministry under Eduard Shevardnadze, who replaced Gromyko in 1985. At the Twenty-seventh CPSU Congress in 1986 a new plan for an "all-embracing system of international security" was proposed, with new foreign-policy goals. While general and utopian, the principles were later elaborated by Gorbachev and his supporters, and formed the core of Soviet "new thinking" on foreign policy and arms control initiatives. The Gorbachev approach was based on the idea that a new interdependency, or interconnectedness, existed in the world. Security in the nuclear world was defined as a political problem to be solved by political means. "Mutual security" required cooperation not confrontation. The threat of nuclear annihilation demanded either elimination or drastic reduction of nuclear weapons.

One of Gorbachev's most radical ideas was that of "all-human values." This was directly related to the nuclear threat and the belief that differences between classes or social systems could not justify the risk of nuclear war. Acceptance of "all-human values" was a radical departure for socialism, and opened the ideological door to new opportunities for cooperation with the West. At the practical level there were calls for the de-ideologization of foreign policy and international relations. This meant that policies should reflect national interests, rather than ideological competition.

Radical changes in Soviet thinking about military policy and disarmament also occurred. The concept of "reasonable sufficiency" (razumnaya dostatochnost') was presented at the Twenty-seventh Congress. Though initially vague, it became the central principle guiding military and disarmament policies. As defined by the WTO in May 1987, reasonable sufficiency meant that the balance of forces should be maintained at the lowest possible level, and be structured to protect the country without threatening neighbors. Based on the principle of reasonable sufficiency, prevention of war, not preparation for war, characterized the Soviet's new, "defensive" military doctrine.

The concept of sufficiency was defined as the opposite of superiority or "superarmament" (sverkhvooruzhennost') and raised the possibility of asymmetrical and unilateral arms reductions. Gorbachev rejected quantitative parity, and the matching of weapon system for weapon system, in favor of qualitative parity, and "roughly equal" quantitative levels of weapons. After debate on the concept of minimum deterrence, it was generally accepted that, for reasons of strategic stability, parity should still apply to strategic nuclear forces. With Soviet conventional superiority in Europe, there was far greater scope for asymmetry (in force planning and arms reductions) and unilateralism.

Several factors motivated Soviet "new thinking." A desire for an enduring and more sophisticated d;aatente was one. Brezhnev's d;aatente was seen as flawed, based on superpower condominium rather than global cooperation. And Soviet economic decline meant that increased trade, access to the world economy, and badly needed new technologies were sought. Decreased reliance on the "military factor" in security could also allow for military reductions. Arms control and disarmament initiatives became the focal point of the new diplomacy, and the main method whereby a new era of non-confrontation could develop. This was accompanied by active diplomacy to renew relations with the United States, Europe, and Asia. Soviet support for socialist countries in the third world also radically changed, and in many cases military and economic support was withdrawn.


Gorbachev's Unilateralism

Though from different eras, there are some similarities between the disarmament diplomacies of Khrushchev and Gorbachev, especially in the area of unilateral actions. This included moratoriums and unilateral troop reductions to demonstrate willingness to negotiate in certain spheres, and in many cases, to gain political advantage.

One of Gorbachev's first acts was a unilateral moratorium on underground testing of nuclear weapons while the Americans continued testing. The Soviet aim was to pressure the United States to agree on a joint moratorium, leading to negotiations on a comprehensive test ban. The Soviets later agreed to the limited goal of lowering test numbers and thresholds. The Nuclear Testing Talks (NTT) began in November 1987 to establish verification measures for the Threshold Test Ban Treaty of 1974 and the Peaceful Nuclear Explosions Treaty of 1976, both of which remained unratified by the United States.

Gorbachev dramatically raised Western confidence when he announced, in a speech to the U.N. on 7 December 1988 that the Soviet Union would unilaterally remove 500,000 troops, 10,000 tanks, 8,500 artillery pieces, 800 combat aircraft, bridging equipment, and assault-landing units from eastern Europe. The reduction was intended to demonstrate sincerity in applying the principle of sufficiency and the new defensive doctrine.

In May 1989 Gorbachev stated that the Soviet Union would unilaterally withdraw 500 short-range nuclear warheads from central Europe (284 short-range nuclear missile warheads, 166 air-dropped bombs, and 50 nuclear artillery shells). This was followed in June 1989 by Shevardnadze's announcement of a unilateral reduction in central Europe of 60 short-range nuclear force (SNF) launchpads and nuclear artillery units. Soviet interest in SNF negotiations was high and motivated these initiatives. However, discussions were postponed, in part because the issue was viewed as increasingly irrelevant in view of the dissolution of the Soviet empire.

By 1989 two-thirds of Soviet and WTO divisions in central Europe were undergoing significant reorganization, and one-sixth of these forces were being withdrawn. Training and military exercises were reported to have taken on a more defensive orientation, and tank production decreased by 40 percent. Operational planning was revised and counteroffensives into enemy territory were reevaluated. Operational maneuver groups were disbanded.

As the nations of eastern Europe began to pull free of Soviet control in the fall of 1989, the Soviet Union engaged in a kind of "forced unilateralism." The Soviets removed all of their troops from Hungary and Czechoslovakia by mid-1991, and agreed to a withdrawal from the reunited Germany by 1994. A similar agreement reached with Poland in October 1991 declared that all Soviet combat troops would be withdrawn by November 1992 and remaining units by the end of 1993. The Baltic states of Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia gained independence from the Soviet Union in August 1991, and Russia was negotiating troop-withdrawal dates with all three republics in the summer of 1992.

Gorbachev deliberately asked for reciprocity from the West to match these unilateral actions not only to support the Soviet military, who were anxious not to be seen making outright concessions to the West, but also to demonstrate that the West shared a spirit of cooperation with the Soviet Union.

Despite a successful arms-reduction policy, restructuring of the Soviet armed forces proceeded at a slow pace. The return of troops from eastern Europe, calls for autonomy by Soviet republics, and the military leadership's slowness in implementing reforms all contributed to difficult problems for the Soviet army. Many within the military leadership objected to Gorbachev's arms-reduction policies.


Gorbachev's Successes

In formal negotiations Gorbachev's achievements were impressive and demonstrated the Soviet intention to move beyond propagandistic negotiating tactics. Soviet concessions in the Conference on Disarmament in Europe (the Stockholm Conference) agreement in 1984 included moving away from an emphasis on "political" confidence- and security-building measures (declaratory statements of intention on matters such as non-use of force, non-aggression, and no-first-use of nuclear weapons), dropping insistence on CSBMS for naval exercises, and acceptance of obligatory observers and advance notification. A major breakthrough came in July 1986 with the first on-site inspection of the Soviet's principal underground test site and when the Soviets, for the first time, accepted on-site inspections to monitor military exercises in Soviet territory. The Soviets were successful in gaining agreement on a non-use of force declaration, something that was in their view significant as a political CSBM. The final agreement included provisions for observers at exercises above 17,000 troops and alerts of longer than seventy-two hours; advance notification of exercises of over 13,000 troops; submission of annual calendars of planned exercises; two years' advance notice on exercises exceeding 40,000 troops; and the right to three on-site or aerial inspections per year.

The second major accomplishment, the INF Treaty signed in December 1987, was made possible, in part, by Gorbachev's abandonment in October 1985 of Soviet policy that linked INF to START and SDI. Other major concessions came when Gorbachev dropped insistence on the inclusion of French and British nuclear forces and U.S. forward-based systems in INF. The treaty itself also involved a number of Soviet concessions, and required acceptance of highly asymmetrical cuts in weapons systems (roughly four Soviet warheads for one American).

At the superpower summit conference held in Reykjavík, Iceland, in October 1986 the Soviets accepted the "zero option" first proposed by Reagan in 1981, and added a freeze on shorter-range intermediate nuclear forces (SRINFS, with a range of 500-1,000 kilometers) that included Soviet SS-23s and SS-12s. But Moscow relinked INF to a ban on SDI testing and deployment, creating a stalemate after the summit. Reluctant to paralyze arms control, in February 1987 Gorbachev again separated INF from SDI. By March the Soviets had accepted the principle of on-site inspections, monitoring of production facilities, and an exchange of data. Formal Soviet acceptance of a global "double-zero" agreement, eliminating all INFS and SRINFS, came in July 1987. The final treaty was delayed several months due to Soviet insistence that West Germany's seventy-two short-range Pershing 1As, armed with U.S. warheads, be eliminated. In August 1987 German Chancellor Helmut Kohl offered to dismantle the 1As in exchange for Soviet and U.S. acceptance of a double-zero accord. Four months later an INF Treaty providing for the elimination of all Soviet and U.S. medium- and shorter-range missiles within three years was signed in Washington, D.C. For the Soviets the pact was especially significant as the first concrete demonstration of their new conciliatory approach in disarmament.

The Conventional Forces in Europe (CFE) negotiations opened in March 1989 and a treaty was signed in less than two years, a remarkable achievement considering the fruitless history of Mutual and Balanced Force Reduction talks. The Soviets were highly motivated and wanted to sign a treaty that would allow them both to reduce the economic burden of their huge conventional forces and to demonstrate their new defensive military doctrine. Officially the Soviets continued to insist that a roughly equal balance of forces existed in Europe; however, Moscow's assent to highly asymmetrical reductions was a tacit acknowledgment of the Soviet conventional superiority that had worried NATO officials for so long.

The Soviets made a number of concessions in order to achieve a CFE agreement. In the spring of 1986 the Soviet Union accepted that a treaty on conventional forces could be applied to the Atlantic-to-the-Urals region, 1,200 kilometers (720 miles) inside Soviet territory. They also accepted the West's idea of regional force ceilings, although for a long time differences existed on the numbers and kinds of forces to be reduced in different zones. The WTO initially proposed a three-stage conventional-force reduction, but this was dropped in favor of NATO'S one-stage plan. In 1989 the WTO for the first time published its own figures on the military balance in Europe, thereby acknowledging Soviet superiority in tanks, armored combat vehicles, and artillery.

From the beginning of the CFE talks there was close agreement on limits for tanks and armored combat vehicles, while the Soviets argued for higher levels of artillery. In May 1989, NATO acquiesced to Soviet insistence on including combat aircraft and manpower, which brought new complications to the negotiations. Nonetheless, the CFE Treaty, signed November 1990 in Paris amid much fanfare, required the Soviet Union to eliminate 7,875 tanks, 9,890 armored combat vehicles, 763 pieces of artillery, and 1,461 aircraft--ten times what the West was required to cut. The ceilings allowed the Soviets slight increases in helicopters. Troop levels were not covered in the accord. With CFE the Soviets agreed to the most intrusive and comprehensive verification regime seen in any arms-reduction agreement.

Along with CFE three other documents were signed: These included the Vienna Document detailing new CSBMS, building on the earlier CDE agreement; the Charter of Paris, identifying permanent institutions and a new role for the CSCE (the permanent institutions included a secretariat in Prague, the Conflict Prevention Centre in Vienna, and the Office of Free Elections in Budapest); and a Joint Declaration heralding the beginning of a new era in European relations. The Soviet Union would have liked to have seen a nuclear no-first-use statement contained in the Joint Declaration, but NATO'S continuing reluctance on this point allowed only for a statement affirming that "weapons will never be used except in self-defense."

For the Soviets the historic Paris Summit was marred by growing economic and political instability in Moscow and the collapse of their alliance system. After the Soviet satellite states in eastern Europe became self-governing in the autumn of 1989, and the WTO began to disintegrate (it was formally disbanded in July 1991), conservatives in the Soviet armed forces expressed fears that the country was becoming militarily isolated. In November 1990 the CFE Treaty was temporarily threatened when it was revealed that the Soviet military had transferred a massive number of treaty-limited items east of the Ural Mountains (out of the treaty zone) prior to the signing of CFE; reclassified three army divisions as "coastal defense divisions" belonging to the navy; and transferred or omitted information on other units in the Atlantic-to-the-Urals region. Though a compromise was worked out, Western confidence in the Soviet political leadership's ability to restrain its military was shaken, and the atmosphere in arms control was negatively affected.

The START negotiations defied resolution until mid-1991. After talks resumed in March 1985 (following the Soviets' late-1983 walkout), Soviet concessions included acceptance of warheads as one measure in counting rules; agreement on a 50-percent (rather than 25-percent) reduction in strategic delivery systems; acceptance of some limits on mobile missiles; and an agreement not to set ceilings on U.S. forward-based systems or on sea-launched cruise missiles with a range of more than 600 kilometers (360 miles). A major barrier to a treaty fell in September 1989 when Moscow dropped its insistence that START be linked to U.S. restraint on SDI.

The negotiations were given some impetus after a speech by Gorbachev in January 1986. Outlining his vision for a "nuclear-free world" he said that the superpowers should reduce strategic arsenals by half in five to eight years, as well as renounce space-strike weapons. The Reykjavík Summit in October 1986 came close to an agreement on Gorbachev's utopian vision of eliminating all offensive ballistic missiles (all nuclear weapons in the Soviet interpretation), but faltered on the question of SDI. Even so, the summit served to formalize acceptance of the goal of a 50-percent reduction in strategic nuclear weapons and a 50-percent reduction in Soviet heavy ICBMS (SS-18s).

Despite a general consensus on overall numbers, major problems remained. These included disagreement on sublimits for ICBMS; rules for counting air-launched cruise missiles and numbers of sea-launched cruise missiles and whether they should be included at all; Soviet objections to limits on mobile missiles; and limits on MIRV ed missiles. The Soviets were especially reluctant to accept restrictions on mobile missiles because modernization of their ICBMS was proceeding in this direction.

A number of subagreements designed to build confidence in a START treaty were signed and implemented in 1989 and 1990. These involved reciprocal demonstrations of "tagging" techniques for ballistic missiles (verification techniques whereby warheads can be mechanically or electronically tagged to determine if they have been tampered with, and to account for numbers of weapons), mutual demonstrations of methods for verifying numbers of ballistic-missile warheads, and inspections of heavy bombers to distinguish those capable of carrying nuclear-armed ALCMS.

A final agreement on START was reached in July 1991. The goal of 50-percent reductions was not realized, nor was the goal of limiting substantial modernization of the Soviet ICBM force. The treaty limited each side to 6,000 "accountable warheads" (a 35-percent reduction for the Soviet Union and a 25-percent reduction for the United States); strategic nuclear delivery vehicles were limited to 1,600, and ballistic-missile warheads to 4,900. Soviet heavy ICBMS were limited to 1,540 warheads, and mobile ICBMS to 1,100. Intrusive verification included the right to short-notice inspections at missile facilities and the monitoring of mobile ICBM production facilities.

Under Gorbachev, some progress was also made in limiting chemical and biological weapons. Although the multilateral Biological Weapons Convention, which banned production of biological weapons and mandated the destruction of existing stocks, was worked out under U.N. auspices and signed by more than 70 nations in April 1972, it was not until 1987 that the Soviet Union ceased production of chemical arms. In January 1989 Shevardnadze announced that the Soviet Union would begin destruction of its chemical weapons once appropriate facilities had been built. A number of Soviet-United States exchange visits to chemical-weapon facilities occurred in 1990 and 1991.

Gorbachev's legacy, of arms-reduction successes will remain a watershed in Soviet disarmament history. Yet as 1991 progressed the long-standing rationale for arms control negotiations collapsed as the Soviet Union itself dissolved. Communist party hard-liners attempted to replace Gorbachev in August during a three-day coup. The president was reinstated, but he functioned with greatly reduced powers until the Soviet Union effectively ceased to exist. On 7 December the presidents of Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus (formerly known as Byelorussia), signed an agreement establishing the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS). Seven other republics joined the Commonwealth on 21 December, and four days later Gorbachev resigned as president of the USSR. Only Georgia and the three Baltic states remained outside the CIS.

On 28 January 1992, U.S. President George Bush announced a wide-ranging initiative to reduce strategic nuclear weapons through unilateral and bilateral methods. A day later Russian President Boris Yeltsin responded with a similar comprehensive package of proposals, suggesting strategic nuclear weapons should ultimately be reduced to a level of 2,000 to 2,500 warheads for each side. Proposals for the unilateral reduction of tactical nuclear weapons had already been put forward by Bush on 27 September 1991 and by Gorbachev on 5 October 1991.

From the beginning the CIS leaders promoted the idea of a unified command over strategic nuclear weapons. After much hesitation and numerous contradictory statements Ukraine, Kazakhstan, and Belarus tentatively agreed that all nuclear warheads should be returned to Russia, making it the de facto heir of the Soviet nuclear arsenal and forestalling the creation of new nuclear countries in the republics of the former Soviet Union. However, ratification of the START agreement remained in doubt pending formal CIS agreement on responsibility for implementation and destruction. The equally contentious issue of the "repatriation" of tactical nuclear weapons back to Russia was resolved in the late spring, and withdrawals were largely completed by May 1992. The future of the CFE Treaty also remained in question as governments grappled with the difficult task of adjusting equipment limits to new state boundaries. Agreement on the distribution of cuts was reached during a CIS summit in Tashkent, Uzbek, in May 1992; however, not all members of the CIS attended, leaving unanswered questions about implementation of the CFE Treaty.

The collapse of the Soviet Union heralded the end of forty-six years of East-West confrontation in the nuclear age, and the beginning of a new era of uncertainty and instability. Economic and political chaos, internal CIS squabbles, nationalism, ethnic conflicts, border disputes, disagreements about the division of the assets of the former Soviet army and navy, and emergent national armies and defense establishments all became major concerns. For the former Soviet republics the struggle to define statehood usurped arms control and disarmament as the central issue of the 1990s.


Bibliography


General

John H. Barton and Lawrence D. Weiler, eds., International Arms Control: Issues and Agreements (Stanford, Calif., 1976) is a standard treatment that provides good coverage of the Soviet position in all major negotiations. Jozef Goldblat, Agreements for Arms Control: A Critical Survey (Cambridge, Mass., 1982) contains some sections on Russian and Soviet involvement in early disarmament agreements.

A short summary of the Soviet approach to arms control is Roman Kolkowicz, Matthew P. Gallagher, and Benjamin S. Lambeth, The Soviet Union and Arms Control: A Superpower Dilemma (Baltimore, 1970).


Historical Policies

One of the few books that is strong on the 1917-1945 period is P. H. Vigor, The Soviet View of Disarmament (New York, 1986), which attempts to cover all major disarmament proposals while at the same time offering analysis of Soviet motivations in pursuing various disarmament initiatives.

Walter C. Clemens, Jr.'s The Superpowers and Arms Control (Lexington, Mass., 1973) and his essay, "Lenin on Disarmament," Slavic Review 23 (September 1964): 504-525, provide expert examinations of early Soviet views on disarmament. A very sympathetic view of Litvinov's diplomatic accomplishments and disarmament efforts is Arthur U. Pope, Maxim Litvinoff (New York, 1943).

Vladislav Zubok and Andrei Kokoshin, "Opportunities Missed in 1932?" International Affairs [Moscow] (February 1989): 112-121 is an excellent post-Brezhnev analysis of the Soviet participation in the 1932 Disarmament Conference. An analysis of the period in which Soviet security concerns moved from disarmament to the question of collective security is Jonathan Haslam, The Soviet Union and the Struggle for Collective Security in Europe, 1933-39 (New York, 1984).


Post-1945 Negotiations

Joseph L. Nogee, Soviet Policy Towards International Control of Atomic Energy (Notre Dame, Ind., 1961) provides a detailed analysis of the Soviet attitude toward atomic energy and Soviet motivations for rejecting the Baruch Plan. Thomas B. Larson, Disarmament and Soviet Policy, 1964-1968 (Englewood Cliffs, N.J., 1969) discusses all the major negotiations during the 1960s and the factors motivating Soviet disarmament policies; and Carl G. Jacobsen, ed., Strategic Power: USA/USSR (New York, 1990) is an anthology on Soviet and U.S. security and arms control policies.

An early assessment of Khrushchev's motives in disarmament is Thomas W. Wolfe, "Khrushchev's Disarmament Strategy," Orbis 4 (Spring 1960): 13-27. Lincoln P. Bloomfield, Walter C. Clemens, Jr., and Franklyn Griffiths, Khrushchev and the Arms Race: Soviet Interests in Arms Control and Disarmament, 1954-1964 (Cambridge, Mass., 1966) provides a detailed analysis of Soviet policies during the Khrushchev period.

Raymond L. Garthoff, Détente and Confrontation (Washington, D.C., 1985) examines United States--Soviet relations from Nixon to Reagan, with a strong emphasis on arms control.


Gorbachev's Radical Arms Control/Military Policies

Christoph Bluth, New Thinking in Soviet Military Policy (London, 1990) provides a concise summary of arms control and military policies under Gorbachev; while Walter C. Clemens, Jr. Can Russia Change? (Boston, 1990) is a historically based analysis of Gorbachev's security policies. Mikhail Gorbachev's Perestroika (New York, 1987) outlines his "new thinking" on restructuring of the Soviet Union and its relations with the world. Of particular interest is the chapter on the problems of disarmament and United States--Soviet relations.

Stephen Shenfield, Minimum Nuclear Deterrence: The Debate Among Soviet Civilian Analysts (Brown University, Center for Foreign Policy Development, 1989) is an excellent summary of the minimum-deterrence debate among Soviet civilian security analysts under Gorbachev. Samuel B. Payne, The Soviet Union and SALT (Cambridge, Mass., 1980) identifies two groups, the "militarists" and the "arms controllers," who participated in the internal Soviet debate on SALT I and II. See also, Pat Litherland, Gorbachev and Arms Control: Civilian Experts and Soviet Policy, Peace Research Report no. 12, School of Peace Studies, Bradford University, U.K. (November 1986), which provides an early analysis of Gorbachev's arms control policies and the new influence of civilian experts at institutes in Moscow.

Elaine M. Holoboff, "The Soviet Concept of Reasonable Sufficiency: Conventional Arms Control in an Era of Transition," working paper 29, Canadian Institute for International Peace and Security (October 1990), analyzes the concepts that guided Gorbachev's conventional-arms--reduction policies in Europe. George E. Hudson, ed., Soviet National Security Policy under Perestroika (Boston, 1990) sets the context for the new Soviet approach to arms control. Alan B. Sherr, The Other Side of Arms Control: Soviet Objectives in the Gorbachev Era (Boston, 1988) is a somewhat dated view of Gorbachev's arms control policies.

Michael MccGwire, Perestroika and Soviet National Security (Washington, D.C., 1991) analyzes Gorbachev's national security and arms control policies; while Stephen Shenfield, The Nuclear Predicament: Explorations in Soviet Ideology (London, 1987) is fundamental to understanding the new Soviet approach to arms reductions.


SALT, INF, and START

A good summary of Soviet policy and decision makers is Lawrence T. Caldwell, Soviet Attitudes to SALT, Adelphi paper no. 75 (1971). Raymond Garthoff, "The Soviet Military and SALT," in Jiri Valenta and William Potter, eds., Soviet Decisionmaking for National Security, 2nd ed. (Boston, 1985): 136-161, is a thorough and concise analysis of Soviet objectives in SALT. Nicolay A. Talensky, "Anti-Missile Systems and Disarmament," in John Erickson, ed., The Military-Technical Revolution (New York, 1966): 219-228, was very important, and controversial, in the 1960s Soviet debates on the survivability of nuclear war and the role of ABM systems.

Thomas W. Wolfe, "Soviet Approaches to SALT," Problems of Communism 19:5 (1970): 1-10, is a summary of the early Soviet position in SALT I; while his The SALT Experience (Cambridge, Mass., 1979) emphasizes the Soviet position during SALT I and II.

An in-depth look at the INF and START negotiations under the Reagan administration, with emphasis on the Soviet positions, is Strobe Talbott, Deadly Gambits (New York, 1984). Jonathan Haslam, The Soviet Union and the Politics of Nuclear Weapons in Europe, 1969-87 (Ithaca, N.Y., 1990), analyzes Soviet interests and decision making in the INF debate.


Specialized Works

A short survey of Soviet attitudes toward confidence-building measures can be found in Bruce Allyn, "Soviet Views of CBMS," in John Borawski, ed., Avoiding War in the Nuclear Age (Boulder, Colo., 1986): 116-130. A good case study of the Soviet pursuit of an NWFZ is B. Ingemar Lindahl, The Soviet Union and the Nordic Nuclear-Weapons-Free--Zone Proposal (Great Britain, 1988).

Manfred Efinger, "The Verification Policy of the Soviet Union," Aussenpolitik 4 (1989): 332-348, outlines Soviet verification policy since 1945. Mikhail Kokeyev and Andrei Androsov, Verification: The Soviet Stance, Its Past, Present and Future (1990) is one of the few books on evolving Soviet attitudes toward verification--the only book available in the West by Russian authors. Richard Kokoski and Sergey Koulik, eds., Verification of Conventional Arms Control in Europe (Boulder, Colo., 1990) provides many insights into the Soviet attitude toward verification.

One of the few in-depth assessments of the Soviet approach to arms control negotiations from Khrushchev to Gorbachev is Paul R. Bennett, The Soviet Union and Arms Control: Negotiating Strategy and Tactics (New York, 1989). Franklyn Griffiths, "Inner Tensions in the Soviet Approach to 'Disarmament,'" International Journal 22 (Autumn 1967) contains an analysis of interest groups and the role they played in the formulation of arms control policies during the 1960s; and Douglas F. Garthoff, "The Soviet Military and Arms Control," Survival 19:6 (1977): 242-250, summarizes Soviet decision-making structures for arms control during the 1970s and the role of the military in these decisions.


Soviet Deterrence/Military Policies

John Erickson, "The Soviet View of Deterrence: A General Survey," in Jonathan Alford, ed., The Soviet Union: Security Policies and Constraints, Adelphi Library 15 (1985) distinguishes Soviet concepts of deterrence from Western concepts; while Raymond Garthoff, "Mutual Deterrence, Parity and Strategic Arms Limitation in Soviet Policy," in Derek Leebaert, ed., Soviet Military Thinking (London, 1981): 92-124, responds to the Western debate on whether the Soviet Union accepts the concept of deterrence. For the opposite perspective, see Richard Pipes, "Why the Soviet Union Thinks It Could Fight and Win a Nuclear War," Commentary, 64:1 (1977): 21-34.

David Holloway, The Soviet Union and the Arms Race, 2d. ed. (New Haven, Conn., 1985) contains useful sections on the Soviet approach to arms control with an emphasis on nuclear weapons, early Soviet atomic programs, Soviet military power, technology, and the economy; and Malcolm Mackintosh, "The Russian Attitude to Defence and Disarmament," International Affairs 61 (1985): 385-394, examines the historical and geographical basis of Soviet attitudes toward defense and disarmament since Stalin.

One of the best summaries of Soviet military doctrine from the 1920s to the 1980s is Harriet F. Scott and William F. Scott, Soviet Military Doctrine: Continuity, Formulation, and Dissemination (Boulder, Colo., 1988). Raymond Garthoff, Deterrence and the Revolution in Soviet Military Doctrine (Washington, D.C., 1990) places Gorbachev's new thinking and arms control policies in a broad historical context; and William C. Green and Theodore Karasik, eds., Gorbachev and His Generals: The Reform of Soviet Military Doctrine (Boulder, Colo., 1990) is also important for its analysis of military changes made under Gorbachev.

Michael MccGwire, Military Objectives in Soviet Foreign Policy (Washington, D.C., 1987), especially the chapter on "Military Objectives and Arms Control" (232-282), remains controversial because of MccGwire's contention that the Soviets in December 1966 accepted the West's concept of mutual deterrence based on massive retaliation. Nonetheless, it is a rather good and comprehensive book on Soviet military policy.

One of the most succinct analyses of Soviet concepts of limited nuclear war from the 1950s to the 1980s is Edward L. Warner, III, "Soviet Concepts and Capabilities for Limited Nuclear War: What We Know and How We Know It," Rand note N-2769-AF (February 1989).


Reference Works

Disarmament and Security, 1987 Yearbook (Boulder, Colo., 1988) and Disarmament and Security, 1988-1989 Yearbook (1989), prepared by the Institute of World Economy and International Relations, USSR Academy of Sciences, are excellent anthologies summarizing Soviet assessments of all major arms control and disarmament issues during the Gorbachev years. A. A. Gromyko and B. N. Ponomarov, eds., Soviet Foreign Policy, Vol. I: 1917-1945 and Vol. II: 1945-1980, 4th rev. ed. (Moscow, 1981) contain large segments on disarmament with a sympathetic pre-Gorbachev assessment of Soviet positions.

A superb reference guide on early Soviet disarmament policy, containing both Western and Soviet sources is Walter C. Clemens, Jr., Soviet Disarmament Policy, 1917-1963 (Stanford, Calif., 1965)--the brief annotations are a useful guide to Soviet disarmament policy during the 1920s and 1930s. For more recent events, see William C. Green, Soviet Nuclear Weapons Policy: A Research and Bibliographic Guide (1987), which covers all aspects of Soviet nuclear-weapons policy with comprehensive annotation.


-- Elaine M. Holoboff